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Learning path

Tighten your databases

Lock down RDS: private subnets, IAM auth, custom ports and logging.

7 lessons·~95 min total

Lessons in this path

  1. 1
    Compliance AWS

    Enable RDS Enhanced Monitoring

    Security Hub RDS.6 — default CloudWatch shows hypervisor-level metrics. Enhanced Monitoring exposes OS-level CPU, memory, and disk granularity.

    10 min
  2. 2
    Compliance AWS

    Deploy across multiple Availability Zones

    One capability across databases, caches, load balancers, file systems, search domains and serverless: make sure no single Availability Zone outage can take a production workload down.

    14 min
  3. 3
    Compliance AWS

    Harden database auth, ports and access

    One capability across RDS, Aurora, Neptune, DocumentDB, OpenSearch, Redshift and DMS: stop relying on default admin names and static passwords, move authentication onto IAM, and make sure the audit trail and network placement do not leave the door ajar.

    15 min
  4. 4
    Compliance AWS

    Move resources into private networks (VPC isolation)

    One capability across databases, search, serverless and EC2: put workloads inside private VPC subnets and reach AWS services privately, so nothing depends on a route to the public internet.

    14 min
  5. 5
    Compliance AWS

    Harden security groups and restrict ingress

    One capability across EC2, RDS, Redshift and network ACLs: stop firewall rules from opening administrative and data-tier ports to the whole internet, and keep default and unused rules from accumulating.

    14 min
  6. 6
    Compliance AWS

    Enable database audit and log exports

    One capability across RDS, Aurora, Redshift and OpenSearch: make every managed data store ship its audit and engine logs off the instance to CloudWatch or S3, so you keep a durable record of who connected and what ran.

    14 min
  7. 7
    Compliance AWS

    Encrypt AWS databases at rest

    One capability across RDS, Aurora, DocumentDB, Neptune, Redshift, DynamoDB, ElastiCache and OpenSearch: make sure the data on disk, and in every snapshot it produces, is encrypted with a KMS key rather than stored in the clear.

    14 min